With the increasing popularity of the Internet and World Wide Web to disseminate and facilitate the exchange of information, computer users often need to interact with electronic forms. Such forms are commonly used to automate business transactions in electronic commerce (“e-commerce”), and help to facilitate the streamlined collection of information by all kinds of organizations including government agencies, healthcare providers, financial institutions, schools, libraries and the like.
Users can currently use computer-based form filling software that provides assistance when dealing with a form that is hosted by a website. The form filling software typically examines the form and can help fill it out by using information that the user previously entered and which was stored by the software. These capabilities often let the user save time and can reduce data-entry errors when filling out forms.
While the form-filling software can often perform satisfactorily in many scenarios, it is not always possible for it to accurately and reliably identify all the fields in a form. That is typically because the code used to compose the page, such as HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XHTML (eXtensible HMTL), does not generally enable the form filling software to determine the purpose of a particular field in the form. Such shortcomings can lead to forms being incorrectly filled out, or some or all fields in a form being missed. While users can sometimes correct or complete the form manually, or the form-filling program can be configured to learn from its mistakes over time, the users' expectations are not necessarily well met by such workarounds. In addition, the organization collecting the information may often incur additional costs in dealing with forms that contain inaccurate or incomplete information which may come about in situations where the user or software do not catch and correct the mistakes.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.